Today, denying the existence of the issues that essentially falsify the Marcott et al paper, while at the same time making sure his readers have absolutely no link to the contrary findings, or even to name “he who must not be named” lest readers might be tempted to Google it, Romm has a new post up, pushing yet again his hilarious projection of the future:

Like a dog playing fetch, he only sees the stick, runs after it, and completely misses the fact that the small blue uptick upon which he bases his projection premise has been shown to be nothing more than an artifact of the shoddy science (removal of some unfavorable proxies) that somehow made it past peer review.

I have decided that this insistence on seeing sticks where there are none needs a label, and here’s what I have decided upon. “stickophrenia”. Here’s the definition:

Stickophrenia is one of the most chronic (long-lasting) and disabling of climate science disorders. People with stickophrenia see hockey sticks where none exist, and the sticks can be made up of just about any data on hand. It is a climate science disorder that causes easily identifiable symptoms such as:

Hard to tell given the scale of the graph, but it appears that Uncle Joe predicts around a seven degree C temperature increase over the next century or so, maybe less. Given the straight shape of the line, we should therefore see about a 7/10 degree gain over the next decade. Not going to happen, but no amount of falsification can shake the faith of true believers in Mann-made “climate change”. No lie too big for acolytes & apostles of the anti-human faith.
As for the instrument record, there is indeed reason to doubt it, given the siting failures you have found & the blatant “adjustment” of at least land station records. When government pays for “research”, government gets the findings it wants.

Romm writes: “They are arguing that the warming of the past century the authors found in their proxy records is in error. What makes this so head-exploding is that the uptick just happens to match the uptick in the heavily documented and independently verified instrumental record. So the disinformers are spending most of their time attacking the one part of the paper we know is unequivocally is true. That is the quintessence of anti-science.”
This is a game changer in that they finally unravelled in a way that renders them publically ridiculous in a way lay readers can clearly understand, and it dragged the whole hockey stick industry into it. The entire left wing has tied its wagons to this beast.

Firstly I would consider the blue uptick suspect because, even at the large time scale here, is not natural. To then continue that vertically could be considered the act of a child told to ”continue that nice blue line” by a stupid teacher.
Any study considering past climate must account for diverging accuracies the further back you go. A shorter time period would have shown (?) the RWP, MWP, LIA, far more clearly. If I was cynical I would have thought that the choice of time period was to confuse and distort the data, assuming the data was correct in the first place.

what about Climate Cult Syndrome, where individuals with an unblemished past go ga-ga after becoming enamoured of Michael Mann and friends? Lovelock, Attenborough and recently Phil Plait are sad examples, whilst Revkin sounds almost cured of the illness.

Well the NHL and the players union settled so nobody needs “The Hockey Team” any more. There is real hockey to be watched.
” Jimmy Haigh. says: March 19, 2013 at 6:48 am
Warmists always do have a hold of the wrong end of the (hockey) stick.”
Good one Jimmy. Made me laugh.

NikFromNYC says:
March 19, 2013 at 6:55 am
Nice work, Nik. In this quotation, Romm remains confused between the instrumental record and the bogus paleo record. This raises another question. Is Mann still defending his hockey stick? I get the impression that Mann and Romm are looking to some chart that has the shape of a hockey stick and they are calling it the instrumental record.

In the worst case, Paranoid Stickophrenia, the sufferer hears voices that tell him to arrange data in the form of a hockey stick. The sufferer experiences intense fear that others are conspiring to take away his hockey sticks. In a rare form, Krugman Syndrome, the sufferer believes that he is an angel of God who must condemn to Hell all who do not hear the voices calling for hockey sticks. The most effective treatment for Stickophrenia is to prohibit the sufferer from sharing public venues where he is rewarded for arranging random data into hockey sticks.

By far the biggest group of climate change deniers in the world are climate scientists and the IPCC.
Climate Mannia denies the LIA and the MWP. They deny that climate change is natural. They deny there is anything wrong with their math. They deny to publish their data to support their math. They deny to debate the issue. They deny to allow anyone to publish contrary findings. They deny their reliance on funding driven results. They deny that they are the deniers. Mann made climate change deniers.

I love it when I see graphs like the one above. There is a small uptick at the end, so they use the uptick to extrapolate into the future. It reminds me of my son’s last basketball game, he scored 2 baskets in the final seconds getting a little scoring uptick at the end. So I can now extrapolate that if he continues on this trend he will pick up an additional 218,574 points by the end of the season (next week).

I don’t think that we should use use appendages like’ Phrenia’ lightly, Schizophrenia is a devastating disease which robs parents of children and adults of life. If you want to give someone stick, how about using the word ‘phile’ as in lover of, hence stickophile or if someone wanted to avoid such things, stickophobic. Thanks.

“[Denier blog] traffic has flat-lined or declined since Climategate, and despite their best efforts, they can’t get any real traction on social media.”
Where the assertion of a “consensus among climate scientists” is logical fallacy by appealing to popularity (false though it be) and authority, does the assertion of lost social media “traction” represent the appeal to consequences of a belief?
“Real” climate reporting, as detailed on a web site like Climate Progress, is done via social media or so Romm seems to assert. To Romm, real seemingly pertains to papers that support AGW, while anti-science is the sole purview of climate deniers and journals which publish papers questioning the anthropogenic cause of global warming.
But Romm’s assertion is nothing more than the logical fallacy of appealing to consequences of a belief (and a belief system requires faith – not fact which belongs to science, but I digress). This fallacy can take several forms, but Romm is employing the notion that, “Climate deniers spread anti-science because they lack Twitter/Facebook/etc… followers; therefore, AGW is real because warmist web sites have more Twitter/Facebook/etc… followers.”
What makes Romm’s “reasoning” fallacious is that the consequences of a belief (AGW is real because of the number of followers) has no bearing on whether the belief is true or false (climate deniers spread anti-science). Try exposing such failed reasoning to someone like Romm, and that belief system mentioned previously engages, along with cognitive dissonance and compartmentalization. Put more simply, Romm “scaled back [his] coverage of the denier blogs” because he insists there are zebras and ponies in those ink spots, when (quite truthfully) they’re only ink spots.

I think Romm may be so statistically illiterate that he actually thinks it’s OK to glue a high resolution instrumental record to an extremely low-resolution average of noisy, low-resolution proxies which basically flattens everything so much that we’re still basically in the LIA if the reconstruction *had* worked. But when Michael Mann tweets “Denying the 20th century uptick in the #ExtendedHockeyStick equivalent to denying the instrumental evidence for #globalwarming. Just sayin..”, he’s proving that he’s either deliberately pouring deceiving information out to the public or so ignorant in statistics that he should be fired. My hunch is the latter – but in any case, will the Real Climate Scientists please finally stand up against Mann?

FTA:”Like a dog playing fetch, he only sees the stick, runs after it, ”
Try saying “Anthony Watts” around Romm would be like yelling
“Squirrel!” around my Springer- a frantic, futile, search ,while said
Squirrel chuckles from a limb in the apple tree…

Just curious: Who first coined the phrase “hide the decline”? Was it first mentioned in that Phil Jone’s email referencing “Mike’s Nature trick”? Thanks,
p.s. I propose we have an international Hide The Decline day, on the date the phrase first entered the public consciousness. On this day, everybody gets to “hide a decline” of theirs in a printed-out email letter, which is then tossed en masse into a huge pit before being filled with concrete.

Gee, if I had known all I needed to be a scientist was a straightedge I wouldn’t have avoided taking physics in college. I thought I was going to have to deal with logs and error bars and all that hard stuff.

DON’T knock this attempt to create a hockey-stick! Encourage it!
As Napoleon said, “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake”. In this case we should be playing the part of the advisors who said: “Why don’t you march on Moscow, mon Empereur?”

Posted this on my facebook page, with link so people get what I’m talking about. I know I’ll get some flack… But I don’t care. This is funny.The Climate Cat Fight, boring for quite a while, has really been heating up lately!… Oh, I made a pun there!!! 🙂
“Stickoprenia”!

Yes, it is a bad idea to extrapolate from a proxy record whose final points are “not robust”.
But if you remove the proxy reconstruction for the last 120 years (that part Marcott said was not robust) and replace it with the instrument record (which Watts says does show warming in the past century), don’t you still have something that looks like a hockey stick?

Romm writes: “They are arguing that the warming of the past century the authors found in their proxy records is in error. What makes this so head-exploding is that the uptick just happens to match the uptick in the heavily documented and independently verified instrumental record. So the disinformers are spending most of their time attacking the one part of the paper we know is unequivocally is true. That is the quintessence of anti-science.”
This is obviously how the fraudulent uptick got past the peer review. They appear to have merely assumed that since it looks like previous hockeysticks, it must be true. So they passed the paper through without even checking it.
This is not peer-review, it is poor-review.
.

Lance says: October 20, 2011 at 3:40 am
As I step away from my computer I accelerate to 3 m/h in 1 second. Extrapolating from these “actual measurements” I will break the sound barrier in a little over 4 minutes.
I better button my pajamas.

Gareth Phillips says:
March 19, 2013 at 8:00 am
I don’t think that we should use use appendages like’ Phrenia’ lightly, Schizophrenia is a devastating disease which robs parents of children and adults of life. If you want to give someone stick, how about using the word ‘phile’ as in lover of, hence stickophile or if someone wanted to avoid such things, stickophobic. Thanks.

I agree – a far more accurate terminology Stickophile is someone who is Stickophilic a far more accurate terminology. A Stickophile is a term for someone that sees hockey stick shapes in any data.
The ‘Team’ are desperate to have something that they can put into AR5 that shows looming catastrophe from warming. It will not be easy as based on every instrumental metric for the last 15 years there is no warming and they will need to invent data. That is in effect what they appear to have done with Marcott. While we can make amusing comments this is extremely serious as we know that the Team members in IPCC will have no problem whatsoever in uncritically accepting the Marcott ‘hockey stick’. Indeed I have no doubt that they have already got the Summary for Policy Makers in draft and are looking for papers to support various parts of it. Hence the frustration about their preparatory papers being ‘reviewed’ and shown to be without foundation.

Anthony, he says we have no media traction b/c every time one of us posts a calm, factual, reasoned comment that conflicts with The Litany, he simply deletes it. Some of us he’s even gone to the point of banning our email addresses from making any posts at all!

If a detailed study were performed analyzing the actual “instrumental error” of even a single surface station with the corresponding gridcell average temperature, the error bars on the pre-1978 “instrumental period” would be identifiable as a different type of proxy-measurement.

Romm is the circus clown but there are some interesting developments in the “Marcott curve” which puts more of the circus in jeopardy. In addition to a new post on CA detailing changes in the core top record, there is this very significant comment on a prior thread which deserves some serious exploration:Jean S on “Marcott’s main plot (Figure 1A)”

Hah! There is some additional fun in Marcott’s main plot (Figure 1A). Mann’s hockey stick there is the global EIV-CRU from Mann et al. (2008), which means that there is no actual reconstruction post 1850, since it’s the Reg-EM produced EIV reconstruction! So they have now essentially “grafted the thermometer record onto” Mann’s reconstruction. To his credit, Mann has always been careful to plot the post 1850 part in EIV reconstructions in a different color. He is actually explicitly warning in his data description spreadsheet that the values for 1850-2006 are instrumental data.
So in Marcott et al Fig 1A we have a comparision in the interval 1850-1950 between their reconstruction (uptick) and Crutem3 (LAND only) (annual?) intrumental record (no uptick). But that’s not all, folks! See the associated uncertainties … Mann et al (2008) uncertainties (which seem to match in the plot to those given in the spreadsheet, i.e., 2 sigma, whereas Marcott et al uncertainties are 1 sigma) are naturally calculated only up to 1849 (as there is no actual reconstruction afterwards), but in the Figure 1A they continue all the way to the end. Where did those 1850-2006 uncertainties come from?

Here is the Romm analysis of daylight: In the last two months, we have gained 3 hours of daylight, to 12 hours a day. If current trends continue, in 8 months, we will have daylight around the clock, and in 10 months, we will have 27 of daylight every day.

ThinkRegress.com and their ilk are simply getting comical at this stage.
Their, “it’s much worse than we thought” meme is becoming about as realavent as lime green 100% polyester leisure suits…..
I think the following skit pretty much sums it up:http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5Qf6Sv3A9zs

These days a Fascist is someone who’s winning an argument with a “Progressive” and a Socialist is someone who’s winning an argument with a “Conservative”.
But if you want to go back to an older definition, remember… fasces are sticks.

Michael says:
March 19, 2013 at 12:33 pm
“Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t the study end at 60 years BP? So, with Romm’s addition, at 0.7C temperature increment per decade from 60BP, we would already be some 4.2C above 1953 temperatures.”
Good observation! So Romm’s projection is already falsified! Just like the climate scientists’!
Could some one please write a serious statistical examination of the predictive skill of Joe Romm’s prognosis?

Leo Geiger says:
March 19, 2013 at 9:53 am
“But if you remove the proxy reconstruction for the last 120 years (that part Marcott said was not robust) and replace it with the instrument record (which Watts says does show warming in the past century), don’t you still have something that looks like a hockey stick?”
Yes, but that means splicing two data sets together that have a limit frequency that is a factor of 600 different. (assuming monthly resolution of thermometer record)
Shakun himself acknowledged in video interview with Revkin that the 11,300 year long past of the M&S curve does not resolve decade-long peaks. EVEN Shakun is honest enough to acknowledge that, that should tell you something.

Stickophrenia is one of the most chronic (long-lasting) and disabling of climate science disorders. People with stickophrenia see hockey sticks where none exist, and the sticks can be made up of just about any data on hand. It is a climate science disorder that causes easily identifiable symptoms such as:
Hockey Hallucinations (seeing sticks that don’t exist)
Data Delusions (bizarre thoughts of the data producing hockey sticks, where the data can’t possibly produce one)
Disordered thinking, to the point of arranging data to make sticks to satisfy urges
Social media bloviation
Denial of contrary science, opinions, and data that don’t show hockey sticks

===========================================================================
I never thought I’d say this but maybe the solution to stickophrenia is to go with Obama’s electric kiddie-car. I mean, if we did away with gas powered vehicles then as Mann and Marcott are drawing their little graphs then maybe their hands wouldn’t jerk up every time they hear a car backfire?

WUWT making history… now defining actual medical terms. Stickophrenia is the disease that causes one to see and/or prefer “hockey stick” shapes, but only if the handle is laying flat on the ground, and the blade is on the right side, AND it defies gravity to point upwards.
Some other suggested medical terms we need.
– Peer-Reviewed Flu (a very deadly condition which only strikes if your journal editor or his reviewers tell you you’re sick, but which they hate to diagnose, and will avoid at all costs)
– McIntyre Flu (a minor flu that could hit you only if you’ve avoided the Peer-reviewed flu. This disease wasn’t considered nearly as serious as the Peer-Reviewed Flu, until Joelle Gergis contracted a serious, deadly strain even more virulent than it’s cousin)
– Watermelon Dermatophytoses (a fungus which causes your thick green skin to soften and break, allowing the red and pink inner meat to liquify and flow out onto the ground. Thought to be trigged by large utility bill increases caused by wind and solar power subsidies and electrical generation shortfalls.
– Gorzeera Scabbing (after making doomsday predictions which fail miserably, and fabricating undesired markets based solely on government coercion, this scabbing condition allows scar tissue to form, which stops fatal financial hemmorage, and keeps your economic viability and status from oozing away. The survivors group for this condition is called Seventh-Day Climatology).
– Mann-ic Depressive disorder (huge debilitating mood swings, the upswings caused by others blindly accepting silly claims you’ve made, the depressive phase when they don’t.)
– Twitter-pill ( the act of posting ranting tweets for their analgesic effects, usually prescribed to relieve symptoms of Mann-ic Depressive disorder, Watermelon Dermatophytoses, or Steve McIntyre flu)

Stickophenia is perfect. Especially in the context of the great Phrenology rage of the nineteenth century. It too was sciency. Just by feeling and cataloging the bumps on your head all manner of things about your value and your future could be told. It was almost as sciency as the Eugenics that followed hard on its heels. If only you can feel the bumps that are the science of aggregated flat line proxy temperatures then behold, through stickophrenia those bumps can be digitized, graphed and held up to the world as proof of the coming warmth. Oh wait…it hasn’t gotten warmer? What? Let me fondle those bumps just once more and see if we can get a stick to rise from phrenological ooze and lead us into the light. Hallelujah!

The hockey stick has achieved religious significance among the warmists and is summoned whenever the warmist data needs extra power, maybe it should be called the Holy Hockey Stick of Manntalk (apologies to Monty Python and the holy hand grenade of Antioch).

Mickey Reno says:
March 19, 2013 at 2:03 pm
WUWT making history… now defining actual medical terms. Stickophrenia is the disease that causes one to see and/or prefer “hockey stick” shapes, but only if the handle is laying flat on the ground, and the blade is on the right side, AND it defies gravity to point upwards.
Some other suggested medical terms we need.

Isn’t the main point here that if the actual proxy data is used without manipulation it shows a big decline in the 20th century where actual instrumental measurements show a rise? Doesn’t that demonstrate conclusively that the proxies aren’t ‘robust’ and that the reconstruction of past temperature isn’t scientifically valid???

The price of EU carbon credits has sunk to an all time low.
The EU is now considering swapping carbon trading for a new market in trading hockey sticks and upticks.
Does anyone know the going rate is for an uptick? Or a corrupted scientific hockey stick?
Will Moody’s and Fitch be rating these sticks and upticks?

Owen in GA says:
March 19, 2013 at 3:08 pm
Ok, I see an easy debunk of this…Marcotte et al have their hockey stick starting in 1950. I think we all would have noticed the 7-8C uptick in the last 60 years, wouldn’t we?

=================================================================
Well, I don’t know about the rest of the globe but here in Ohio I know I used my snow shovel more this year than last year. But I’m not a “Climate Scientist” so maybe I’m mistaken.

Stickophrenia Variant: Mannchousen By Proxy, in which a climate scientist induces apparent symptoms of climate disease by manipulating proxy data in order to be perceived as heroically rescuing the world. A form of child abuse.

Something to keep some eyes open for …. I happened to notice that Marcott co-author Jeremy Shakun, although based at Harvard on a fellowship this year, taught the 1-month January ’13 term at Middlebury College (some liberal arts colleges have a 3 or 4 week intensive “winter term” in January, usually for one intensive course or internship). Middlebury College is where the uber-activist Bill McKibben is based, using that snowy cum verdant corner of academe to wage war on evil fossil fuel guzzling deniers (sic).
This does not necessarily mean that McKibben had anything to do with Shakun as a visiting lecturer at Middlebury — even in small colleges, with many of which I am very familiar, departmental boundaries can be strict, different profs don’t necessarily get along or work together, etc. McKibben has some non-science appointment for enviro journalism, whereas Shakun’s course was for the Geology Dept. I have no idea if Shakun and McKibben even know each other, but at a small campus like Middlebury, with relatively few faculty teaching in enviro and earth related areas, it would be surprising if Shakun was brought there recently for a month for any reason except that he nicely fit into the “narrative” of McKibben et al.
Not saying Shakun has any activist affinities with 350.org, and of course scientists have every citizen’s right to participate and agitate etc. for any of their views, but it can be well worth knowing when a supposedly “objective” study comes down the pike which (perhaps) was not generated out of some purist science-for-its-own sake spirit and method. I only got onto this track because in Shakun’s video interview with Revkin I thought “this guy sounds like a political activist not a scientist” — with all his hand-waving, both literal and metaphorical.Shakun at Middlebury CollegeShakun Jan. 2013 course at Middlebury College

The Future of Earth’s Climate as Revealed by Its Past: Middlebury College, Winter 2013
Climate change in the 21st century poses a number of significant questions. For instance, how much will temperature and sea level rise? What is a ‘safe’ level of CO2? How robust are climate models? What is the likelihood of an abrupt climate shift? In this course we will explore the central issues surrounding global warming, particularly as viewed through the lens of Earth’s climate history. We will link climate theory, global warming projections, and the geologic record of past climate to understand the scientific basis for and level of certainty about our climate future.

The Climate Progress graph has the Y axis in degrees F. All the graphs I’ve seen excerpted from the Marcott paper are in degrees C. Is it just to make the numbers bigger and scarier? (Aside from the fact that the extrapolation is bogus)

Gunga Din says:
March 19, 2013 at 3:30 pm
Well, I don’t know about the rest of the globe but here in Ohio I know I used my snow shovel more this year than last year. But I’m not a “Climate Scientist” so maybe I’m mistaken.

And here in Western Washington I haven’t had to use my snow shovel, or even ice melt, at all. Very different from the last 4 years.
This is why you can’t put a global number on anything.

Where’s Elmer?? Can Minnesotans for Global Warming do the “Hokey-Pokey”?
Great LOL post by Pat Frank about using children’s song “The Hokey-Pokey” for the climate core-top hokey pokey. This might be inspiration for a new climate video.The Core-Top Hokey Pokey

I just realized that, “They bent their core-tops in” fits the rhythm of, “The Hokey-Pokey.”
And it turns out to be so appropriate! 🙂
They bent their core-tops in
They bent their core-tops out
They bent their core-tops in
And they shook them all about
They did the climate science
And they’ve turned it all around
That’s what it’s all about!

======================================
Now imagine that instead of Pat’s link to a kindergarten version, try this one, comedian Jim Breuer channelling AC/DC in AC/DC as inspiration

A key point neglected by Romm and friends is that the tale told by Marcott et al. has too little resolution pre-20th century (can’t really eliminate as much natural variability as Alarmists would like), and then in the 20th century it does not actually track the instrumental records decently at all (thus highlighting Marcott’s ad hoc and careless decisions or errors). Alarmists are already saying “it doesn’t matter” but that is a bizarre stance to take for a study that does this:Climate Audit on Marcott’s Zonal Reconstructions

According to Marcott, NHX temperatures increased by 1.9 deg C between 1920 and 1940, a surprising result even for the most zealous activists. But for the rest of us, given the apparent resiliency of our species to this fantastic increase over a mere 20 years, it surely must provide a small measure of hope for resiliency in the future.

“Patterns might only exist in the mind of the scientist’s desire for order.”

This was in a March 19, 2013 presentation by geologist John Roesink of Bill Barrett Corp, “Before the Data Warehouse – the Importance of Dynamic Data to Sub-Surface E&P Teams.” at the Spotfire Energy Forum, Houston TX. This quote might be his or it might be from John C. Davis, “Statistics and Data Analysis in Geology” (2002). It is a caution to the scientist to skeptical of their own discovered relationships. Just because you want to find a relationship, doesn’t mean there is one to be found.
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.” – Richard Feynman.

How about someone writing an essay comparing what Romm just did with Durkin’s representation of “Lamb’s graph” in “Swindle”?
You know, to look up all the big name complainers about the issue of presenting a graph that makes 1950 look like “now”
Take Romm’s graph with it’s extension from 1950 as if “now”.
What fun!.

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